JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

16Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsdeath, lived alone, and needed her remaining son to care for her. If he joinsthe Free French he deserts his mother. If he stays with his mother he doesnothing to avenge his brother or fight the Nazis. Sartre’s advice to histormented pupil was this: ‘You are free, therefore choose’ (p. 38).Sartre cannot make his choice for him. To choose an adviser is to makea choice. It is also to choose the kind of advice one would like to hear. in thisexample Sartre turns the tables on the determinist, It is the lived confrontationwith freedom that is concrete and real. Determinism is a scientific abstraction.Even if determinism were true it would not be of the least help to the youngman in resolving his dilemma. Nothing can lift from us the burden of ourfreedom.Sartre says we are condemned to be free. We did not choose to be free;indeed, we did not choose to exist. In the Heideggerian idiom, Sartre sayswe are thrown into the world. We have no pre-determined essence. First ofall we exist, then we face the lifelong burden of creating ourselves, generatingour essence by free choices. We are nothing other than what we do and theonly constraint on our freedom is this: we are are not free not to be free.The recognition of our own freedom causes such anxiety that we pretendto ourselves that we are not free. The multitude of behavioural strategieswhich make up this pretence Sartre calls bad faith. He thinks most of us arein bad faith most of the time. It is usually only in extremis, like Mathieu in theclock tower, that we are confronted with the reality of our own freedom. Thelocus classicus of bad faith is in Being and Nothingness:Let us consider the waiter in the café. His movement is quick andforward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward thepatrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forwards a little tooeagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous forthe order of the customer [ . . . ] He is playing, he is amusing himself.But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explainit: he is playing at being a café waiter.(p. 59)Committed literature combats bad faith.Questions of Method prefaces the first volume of Critique of DialecticalReason (1960). (It had appeared in an earlier version in a Polish magazinein 1958.) Sartre argues that existentialism and Marxism are mutuallynecessary in the explanation of human reality. Henceforth, the lived presentof the choosing existential individual is located in history. Sartre says‘philosophy’ does not exist, there are only philosophies. Any philosophy isan expression of a rising social class, and in modern history there have